


from you, me

by wolfstarheart



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, basically life sucks but they work it all out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 02:37:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15233484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfstarheart/pseuds/wolfstarheart
Summary: This is how it starts: with Steve holding the weight of the world on his shoulders, mourning three and a half billion lives he couldn’t save.This is not how it ends.





	from you, me

This is how it starts:

It is midday and it is the darkest the world’s ever been and the clouds overhead are weighed down with tears and smoke and dust. Steve digs his fingernails into his palm and can’t feel it; looks around and realizes he can’t see the destruction, the ground beneath him, any of it. His body is too heavy for his legs to hold up and he drops to his knees. A wind picks up, blowing soil and ash across him, and he thinks, for a short, wild second: let it bury me.

He thinks, if he just sits there, kneeling, waiting for absolution, will the dirt rise up over his shaking shoulders and bare neck and pressed-shut eyelids until he is nothing but dust himself? From ice to earth, from earth to nothingness. Or maybe the wind is a figment of his imagination because time has stopped and there is nothing except this moment of utter and complete loss, destined to ring out until the world ends and the universe collapses in on itself.

He can take nightmares and pain and death but he cannot take this: the souls of three and a half billion souls weighing down on his shoulders, three and a half billion mouths asking him why it was them that had to go, why it was over for them and not for him—

“Steve,” whispers someone, a voice he knows he knows, but his brain cannot recognize, and the forever moment is now in the past, drifting away from him faster and faster until he is squarely in a future he doesn’t want to experience. He sees it now, so clearly, a timeline in his head: this is Before, and this is After, and the points on the line pulse and swim until he isn’t sure where he is any longer. “Steve, we have to—“

The timeline breaks apart like a necklace, pearls dropping to the floor, and Steve picks one up in his mind, and his hand is ghostly and pale, and what he holds in his palm is a memory: “Together.”

But there is no together when Tony isn’t here—

Steve lets go of the memory, lets go of the past, lets Before careen away from him until it is just a pinpoint in the distance, and looks up at the sky. This is the After, the aftermath, and those are just fancy words for the end.

 

 

This is how it starts:

The spaceship lands and Steve is there because nobody else can be. He wonders what hell the universe has in store for him now, what aliens could possibly want with a planet that has lost everything already. The spaceship’s doors creak open and Steve raises his shield and waits to crumble.

There is a woman made of metal and a man made of iron and starlight and Steve sees the timeline again, another memory clasped tightly in his hand: “So was I,” a shield smashing into a suit of red and gold, certain of its destruction, of its righteousness. The memory shatters and stains his skin crimson with blood and Steve drops the shield. Tony is here, Tony is alive, Tony is looking at him like he is turning to dust too—

Steve doesn’t realize they are grasping at each other, this grotesque twist on a hug that has no comfort to be drawn from, until he can feel Tony’s heart so rapidly beating against his own chest, ticking the seconds into the future. Steve breathes him in, coffee and oil and something else, something not Earthly. Steve exhales an apology, repeats it over and over again like the words can travel back in time and force him to fix this before it broke: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—“

“It doesn’t matter,” Tony is saying, but he doesn’t let go of Steve, and somewhere in another universe he is crying.

 

 

This is how it starts:

With rebuilding, with dirt under his fingernails and sweat painting his skin. It is constructive but it is avoidance, it is the middle ground between the end and the moving on, and Steve throws himself into it like it can stretch on forever.

Tony kneels beside him, digging at the rubble, searching for buried treasure. The clouds have cleared and the sun is bright and uncaring and Tony’s skin used to glow in the daylight and his eyes used to look like honey—

 

 

  
This is how it started, once upon a time:

Tony has the kind of laugh that is magic. He hates magic, Steve knows, and would not appreciate that comparison, but it is not unfounded: he throws his head back, a hint of color spreads across his cheekbones, and his eyes are squeezed shut like he can contain the moment forever if only he doesn’t look out at the world and see that it has passed him by. There are moments, Steve knows, where you can feel something shifting, your universe realigning to make room for a future that hadn’t existed until you thought of it just then, and this is one of them. Steve looks at Tony, laughing at a joke he’d made, and knows that this is what love feels like.

It’s funny how months ago they had been at each other’s throats, how hatred had slipped so easily away to make room for grudging respect and then, eventually, for friendship. Steve laughs too, laughs as the warmth bubbles up in him like a soda waiting to explode, and this is the beauty of love: he doesn’t care whether Tony feels it too. He would like it if he did, sure, but hope is not yet something he has started to cling to, and in that perfect summer’s day love is so inexorably selfless. There is a part of him that is forever Tony’s and he has never been happier to be incomplete. He is spilling over with this sense of giving he can’t quite explain, and when he thinks of his words so long ago, now, he laughs harder because he knows he had never understood the meaning of ‘together’ up till now. It is him and Tony and the skies splitting apart in this moment of realization and his heart aching to provide for a man he would follow until the end of the universe.

 

 

This is how it starts:

“I lost Peter,” Tony says, and his face is valleys of darkness and peaks of silvery moonlight. They lie on the ground, uncaring or unaware of the grime settling into their hair and skin, looking up at the stars. Steve knows what he sees: the same constellations he used to pick out as a child, a constant to balance out all the variables in the equation of his life. He wonders whether the ghosts of the Battle of New York have faded to make room for the ghosts still haunting Titan, whether Tony still feels the panic rising up in his throat when he looks up at space. It isn’t his place to do so, not really, but Steve lets the back of his hand brush against the back of Tony’s, hopes that it is enough to ground him, hopes that Tony knows he can always ask for anything that Steve can give him. “Up there. He was so scared, Steve— he, he didn’t want to go, he was asking me to help him. And I couldn’t.”

“Not your fault,” Steve reminds him.

“I know,” Tony says. “I wish it were. I could deal with the guilt then, you know? It would be my own mistake, something under my control. But none of this was under our control. It was just waiting to happen.”

“You saw it,” Steve guesses. “Way before the rest of us even knew Thanos was a threat.”

The silence is an answer in itself.

“What do we do now? How do we just— just keep going,” Steve says, and his voice breaks.

“I don’t know.”

“If there was an answer— a solution— something we could work towards—“

“Steve—“

“Because people are gonna move on, Tony, and I don’t think I can—“

“Steve, I love you.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Tony takes Steve’s hand, twists their fingers together. “You’re probably right.”

“And yet?”

A beat, and then: “I don’t think this is something I can control either.”

 

 

This is how it started, a hundred million moments ago:

Steve sees the alien point its gun at Tony, and the timeline he cannot see yet splits abruptly into two. But it may as well have continued on in a linear path because this is not a choice for Steve. It is an inevitability, a familiarity that comes with destiny rather than self-determination, and Steve shoves himself in front of Tony and hopes he isn’t too late.

Another hundred million moments pass and he wakes up in a hospital bed. He exhales, slowly. The world stops rocking and settles into the forms of wires running from his wrists and monitors showing his vitals and a man slumped forward in a chair beside Steve.

“Tony?” he says before he can stop himself, and the man startles awake, eyes widening and shoulders straightening instantly. “Tony, it’s okay.”

Tony freezes at the sound of his voice, and Steve wants to reach out for him except his muscles feel like lead and all the determination he can muster can’t overpower inertia. “Do you know— do you know you nearly died?”

“It sure feels like it,” Steve says, aiming for a laugh, but it falls flat like he’d told a knock-knock joke at a funeral. “How long—“ he pauses to cough, “how long was I out?”

A muscle in Tony’s jaw twitches. “A week,” he says. “A whole week, Steve, what the hell were you thinking? You couldn’t possibly have known what the alien tech would do to you, and yet you stupidly went and played the hero, like it was your duty, like I was supposed to live with it if you died—“

“Because I wouldn’t have been able to live with it if you had died,” Steve whispers. It’s not something he would ever have said normally— he doesn’t expect Tony to feel the same way, doesn’t want to burden his best friend with the weight of his feelings, would live the rest of his life pining if it meant keeping their friendship intact— but it’s something about the meds he’s on that make him so incapable or so unwilling to hold back the tenderness that is ever-present at the back of his mind.

Tony looks at him sharply, and Steve can see the gears turning, the algorithms running. “Meaning what?”

“You know what,” Steve says tiredly. This is it, he thinks: the point where Tony’s going to understand and walk away and pretend this never happened and let the rays of the morning sun turn his confession into an excuse for distance and empty smiles. It’s going to kill him, but he’s prepared for this. Can accept it, even.

Except Tony is leaning forward, is looking so dizzy with knowledge, is pressing his lips to Steve’s with so much care not to hurt him, soft and breakable and easy, and Steve lets himself give into hope for the first time since he woke up from the ice.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Tony says, pulling away, but it’s a promise he knows Steve can’t keep. It’s a paradox, he knows, the word fitting so perfectly like it had been on the tip of his tongue all along: that here is a man he would do anything for to keep safe, and now this man might just love him enough to do the same for him, no matter the cost. It shouldn’t work, it should be mutually assured destruction, and Steve prays to whatever God is out there that it keeps the both of them safe long enough to enjoy a future that is tinged rosy with love.

 

 

  
This is how it starts:

“I’ve been thinking,” Tony says quietly, “Strange ran through every single possibility, up there. And in the only one where we won, he gave up the Time Stone.”

Steve hasn’t heard this detail before: he hadn’t pressed, and Tony had been seemingly content to summarize the battle on Titan in a few short sentences. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning I think we had to lose in order for us to win.”

Steve raises an eyebrow at him. He hasn’t accepted this yet, this new harsh reality, this After, but that doesn’t mean he’s idealistic enough to think that this is an easy fix. Not anymore. “It would’ve been convenient if he’d told you what you needed to do after you lost.”

Tony’s lips quirk into a smile. “I think we can figure it out,” he says. And if this was anyone else he would scoff, but it’s Tony, Tony the futurist, Tony his enemy-turned-best-friend-turned-lover-turned-enemy-turned-something-he-can’t-quite-name-yet, his Tony. His Tony. There is nothing left to lose, but even if there was, Steve would bet everything he knows on this man with the sun in his eyes and magic in his laugh. And so Steve closes his eyes and the timeline blooms to life before him, and this is After and this is the future, stretching out so far ahead of him that he can’t see the finish line, and memories of battles and kisses and life he hasn’t yet lived yet flicker to life, lighting the way forward.

 

 

This is how it ends:

With a beginning, and Steve can only dare to hope.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> okay i don’t even know where this came from and it is definitely a mess so i’m sorry. thank you for reading and you can hit me up on shellheadtony.tumblr.com anytime if you wanna talk about stevetony or infinity war pain!


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